Yesterday, as U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby gave his daily press briefing in Washington, a rogue Pidgey entered the pressroom. Kirby was unaware — until he noticed a reporter in the briefing who was playing Pokémon Go while he spoke.
“You’re playing the Pokémon thing right there, aren’t you,” Kirby asked from the podium, using the term my mother also uses to describe the game. The reporter replied that he was just “keeping an eye on it.” Okay. Sure.
Kirby continued discussing actual issues, i.e., global terror, only to return to the reporter later in the briefing to ask if he’d managed to catch anything. (In a sentence that I hope is the only time I will hear “Daesh” and a reference to Pokémon Go together ever again.) “No,” the reporter told Kirby, according to the official transcript of the briefing. “The signal is not very good.”
